Bich Minh Nguyen

by Short Girls (v5)

  When Van carried her bag out to the living room she found Linny sitting at the table, her arms flat on the surface like she was waiting for a palm reading.

  “Don’t go saying anything to Dad,” Van said.

  “I won’t. But—”

  “I have to go,” Van insisted. “I guess we can figure out Detroit later.” She pushed herself out the front door so quickly that she forgot to glance back at the credenza, to bid good-bye to her mother, as she’d always done in the past. For a moment Van hesitated on the front stoop, but then kept going to her car. She didn’t want to go back and face her sister. It seemed like a long time had passed since last night, when they had cleaned the house together. The audition in Detroit was four weeks away—enough time, maybe, to let their conversation about Miles descend into the realm of the unbroachable.

  Van backed the old Infiniti away from the spot where it had been sandwiched between Linny’s Corolla and their father’s truck. She wondered where he’d gone—to his friends, or even, as Linny perhaps believed, to Nancy Bao? All the way back to Ann Arbor, driving I-96, U.S. 131, M-22, and the windier roads leading to her subdivision, Van’s mind whirled around the faces and words of Miles, her father, her sister. Of Na Dau, whose number lay somewhere in her bag. She could guess what he’d say when she called, fulfilling her father’s directive. He would have the same questions that so many of Van’s clients had: What will happen? What should I do? And sometimes: Where will I go? And Van would have to try to provide the answer.

  12

  Linny

  As much as she and Van had argued over the years, Linny always hated to see Van leave ahead of her. One thing they agreed on during their visits home was that they wanted to stay as little amount of time as possible. They both only returned at all because they worried about their father being alone in the stale air of that house. Besides, they might never see him otherwise. He had never visited Linny in Chicago and as far as she knew had only stopped in Ann Arbor once, on his way back from a friend’s house in Detroit. Linny couldn’t imagine her father in Chicago, anyway. He sometimes talked about Saigon and its uncontrolled traffic of mopeds and bicycles, but for twenty-eight years now his life had been bound by strip malls, suburbs, and a mid-sized midwestern city whose downtown he never even had to see. And when he was away from his studio he grew anxious. Van had complained about how he’d paced around her house trying to fix or improve things—the hinges on a cabinet, the way the kitchen faucet worked—that weren’t broken. She’d said outright to Linny that she didn’t want the sole responsibility of taking care of him just because she was older. When Linny had defended herself, pointing out the times she’d driven back home just to check on him, Van shot back, “Who do you think has been paying the mortgage?” It was her handy fallback: I give money, therefore I’m a good daughter.

  So whenever they came back for obligatory Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays they tended to leave at the same time, saying tandem good-byes. Linny was a faster driver, so Van always ended up following her to the freeway entrance, where Linny took the westbound exit and Van took the eastbound. Through the rearview mirror Linny could keep Van in sight all the way there, but she never did. She sped into the left lane and in a minute Van fell behind. From there it would be weeks, or longer, before they spoke to each other again.

  Van had also had the advantage of Miles as an excuse. “My family” was all he had to say, and then they were out of there. There had been the one uncomfortable Thanksgiving when the three of them had carpooled to meet Mr. Luong at a friend’s house half an hour north of Wrightville. Miles’s one comment about the distance made Linny understand how annoyed he was, in spite of his veneer of pleasantness, his mild-mannered tone, to have to go out of his way. The three of them had spoken little during the drive. From the backseat Linny couldn’t make out the few murmurs that passed between Van and Miles. They hardly seemed to glance at each other.

  When Van drove away the morning after their father’s party, Linny remembered the echoey sense of emptiness she’d felt around the house when Van first went off to college. Linny hadn’t realized how much she would miss having her—anyone—around to help diffuse the tension between their parents. In her senior year of high school Linny spent as many days as possible at her friends’—anything to get out of the house.

  Three weeks before her high school graduation Linny had come home to see Van’s car parked in front of the house. It had been unusually warm that day, a burst of almost-summer that had drawn Linny and her friends to the Lake Michigan beach-front forty minutes away. Linny could still smell the sand on herself when she walked inside. Van, sitting in the living room with her father, looked up at her with swollen eyes. Their father stood up, keys in hand. He said they should go to the hospital now, where Mrs. Luong, her body, was waiting. Just like that, he said it. Your ma died at Co Ngoc’s. She’d been dead for hours by then, after collapsing on the floor of the nail salon. She had so strange look on her face, Co Ngoc said later. Then she just fallen down. It had all happened while Linny had been at the beach tossing around a volleyball and showing off her bandeau bikini.

  Later, no one spoke of her father’s return to the upstairs part of the house, just as they didn’t speak of leaving Vietnam and whatever distant relatives they had remaining there. After Linny moved out she sometimes stopped by when her father wasn’t around, slipping juice and eggs and apples into the refrigerator. He didn’t mention these things, or seem to notice the magically washed towels and dishes. Sometimes when Linny found the house unexpectedly clean, fresh vacuum marks in the carpet, she realized Van had been there before her.

  On this morning, alone after Van’s hasty departure, a feeling of Sunday solitude settling into the empty house, Linny went to the living room to light a candle and a stick of incense for her mother. She’d always referred to her parents as “vague Buddhists”—they participated in a few of the traditions, like this one, but they seldom visited one of the three temples in town. Her mother’s death had been Linny and Van’s first real glimpse into Buddhist rituals. The day after her death, Linny’s father told her to get some white scarves to wear as headbands. Linny had been confused, picturing the preppy headbands a few girls in her school still wore.

  Her father had mimicked tying a sash around his forehead. “We have to wear them at the funeral.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re in mourning.” He’d sounded exasperated at having to explain.

  “Where do I get these things?”

  “I don’t know. Make them.”

  So Linny had taken a white pillowcase from the hall closet and cut it into strips, using her mother’s sewing machine to finish the edges. Linny still remembered the feel of the cloth against her forehead, and how Van had tied her own too tight so that her hair puffed up over it. They only wore them a few minutes, to light incense and bow three times, copying their father. A few people took pictures, which ended up sitting in one of the credenza drawers. Mr. Luong said he would burn the sashes after the ceremony but she never asked if he did.

  Though Mr. Luong didn’t speak much about his wife he kept her credenza clean, usually remembering to set out a piece of fruit as a symbolic offering. The one thing that made Linny feel truly Vietnamese was this ritual of honoring the dead. Linny lit two sticks of incense and bowed quickly. She studied the photograph of her mother, though she was never sure whether to keep her eyes open or shut. Mrs. Luong, head tilted, chin resting on one manicured hand, smiled back, wearing the same marbled jade bracelet she’d worn to the very end. She’d been cremated wearing it, because she’d meant it when she’d told the girls that jade was forever. Wear it for good luck, her mother had instructed them. Like all proper Vietnamese women, she had a collection of gold and jade necklaces and bracelets, supposed armors against whatever ills may come. It hadn’t helped, Linny had thought bitterly when she opened her mother’s jewelry box two days after the funeral.

  Linny tried hard to conjure her mother now
, to pretend that her ghostly presence had descended into the room. But her mind couldn’t help circling back to Van, to their father. Make them come back, she silently pleaded.

  But the incense burned out and Linny knew it was time to head back to Chicago. She didn’t even need to leave a note of good-bye to her father. She just hoped he would remember the pyramid of oranges and grapes and the box of tea she had arranged on the credenza the day before; the spirit offering of fruit had to be retrieved before going bad. It was, as Linny’s mother had said, a simple matter of respect.

  The night before her mother died, Linny had gotten home late—it was a Saturday night—but not later than her father. As she tiptoed down the hallway Mrs. Luong called out to her from her room. Linny opened the door a sliver and saw her mother lying in bed, reading Parade magazine. She had a small stack of them near her, as though catching up on weeks of suburban recipes and articles on how celebrities balanced work and family.

  “I thought you were asleep,” Linny said.

  “Not asleep. Just resting. I heard you just getting home so late.” Mrs. Luong shook her head. “I don’t like that boyfriend. He’s not serious and he’s not Vietnamese. If you end up getting in trouble—”

  Linny sighed loudly. She didn’t want to hear another lecture about this, and said so.

  Her mother flattened her lips. “Come in here for a minute.”

  Reluctantly Linny went into the room. Her mother, wearing an old Detroit Lions T-shirt, looked so much younger than her years that people often assumed they were sisters. Mrs. Luong looked smaller than Linny, almost frail. Her feet made a minor bump halfway down the bedcovers.

  “When’s the last time you hear from Van?”

  Linny shrugged.

  Her mother dropped the magazine, which was turned to the “Ask Marilyn” section. Marilyn had a genius IQ and offered puzzle answers and general advice to the masses. “Look at your sister. She goes to college, and boom! We never see her again. You and Van are not the same.”

  Linny laughed at the idea. She perched on the bed in a way that made her feel like a caregiver to a patient. In the days and weeks following, that feeling bothered Linny, stayed with her. Had she known something was even then rising in her mother?

  In the small room the rust-colored carpet seemed to glow against the walls that they had painted lavender. The mini-blinds were tinted cocoa on one side and pink on the other. The room seemed hurriedly feminine, as though they’d been in a rush to add colors and floral prints and banish the presence of Mr. Luong.

  “Sometimes with Van you can’t tell her anything because she’s judging. She is smart, but at the same time she’s not so smart. Both you girls have the problem of too much pride.” Linny had rolled her eyes at this, though later it would bother her enough to consider telling Van about the conversation.

  Mrs. Luong picked up another Parade. On the cover an actress clutched an Oscar to her chest. “When I met your ba my sister had a big crush on him. She was a waitress at a canteen he used to go to with his friends, and she would come home and tell me about him. Your ba and his friends were working on the thinking side of the war—the intelligence, right? Well, I tell you—not too intelligent. So, your Co Hoa like him a lot and finally one day I go to work with her to see him. We started talking, and boom! It was just like that. Hoa was so mad! She still tells me sometimes when I call her on the long-distance. But she met someone else anyway.”

  “I never heard this story before.” Linny was taken aback by the rush of her mother’s words, the volume of information. She had rarely stopped to picture her parents young and dating.

  “You never asked.”

  That much was true. She and Van seldom inquired about their parents’ lives—nor did the parents volunteer much. Mrs. Luong had a sister and a brother still in Vietnam and Mr. Luong had an older sister, but they might as well have been characters in an obscure novel to Linny and Van.

  “I’m going to Vietnam this winter,” Mrs. Luong announced. It had been three years since her last visit. She had gone alone then as well as the time before that. Mr. Luong refused to go with her. He always had a reason—his business would suffer; he didn’t have time; they couldn’t afford two plane tickets. Since the early nineties when travel back became possible, it had become almost a competition among the Vietnamese to see who could make the most trips. Mrs. Luong and her friends had endless discussions over the cost of tickets, who got the best deals and the best seats, and which flight paths and airlines were superior. Mr. Luong had plenty of his own opinions on these matters even though he clearly had no interest in going back.

  “You come to Vietnam with me.”

  At that Linny fell silent, as she always did when her mother brought up the topic. Like their father, she and Van cited excuses. School, Van would say, and underachieving Linny would agree. Also work, and needing to earn more money. The truth, which Mrs. Luong surely knew, was that Vietnam seemed a scary unknown to Linny. It seemed more than a commitment; the idea of traveling there felt like heading to therapy to face some latent trauma.

  Although Linny had urged her father to go to Vietnam with Mrs. Luong, she could understand his unwillingness. He was someone who talked about going forward into the future, and who avoided the past. Maybe he was afraid of looking like a failure back in his old neighborhood. Maybe he was afraid of seeing how un-Vietnamese he had become. After her first trip Linny’s mother had said, “I didn’t realize that I become so American.”

  To think that she and Van might have been born there, that they might have lived entirely different lives had their parents not fled the country—this hypothetical seemed to become more potent as Linny grew older. It stood in sharp contrast to their childhood of playgrounds and MTV. Linny had always felt relieved to be American, and the fact of her Vietnameseness often seemed accidental. She wondered if Van too felt that going to their parents’ birthplace would only emphasize the distance between their generations. Linny couldn’t even connect herself to the few photographs her parents kept of their families; she had never felt a tug of obligation toward them. It was strange to think of all the relatives she’d never met. They lived in a different language, a different everything that Linny was almost afraid to see, to face, to know. Going to Vietnam would mean she couldn’t go back to not knowing.

  “I go in December,” Mrs. Luong said that night before she died. “You should come with me, and Van too if she wants.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You never even met your aunt and uncles. Or your grandmother. They always ask about you and Van.”

  Linny grimaced at the reprimand in her mother’s voice. Deflecting, she said, “Well, what about Dad?”

  Mrs. Luong scoffed at this. “He’s not going. He has less reasons for it, anyway.”

  Mr. Luong’s parents were long dead—his father sometime in the sixties and his mother a few years before the North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon. His two brothers had both been killed in the war, and his sister, several years older, never married. He had never said much about any of them.

  “Is his sister still in Saigon?”

  “She was three years ago. She was still working at that orphanage. I didn’t hear anything about her since then. She wanted to be a nun, but I don’t know if she did it. You know she converted during the war.”

  “Will you see her when you go back this time?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know how much your ba talks to her. When we left Vietnam, it was his decision. He didn’t want to regret anything. He didn’t want to go back, ever. That’s how he is.”

  This information was also new to Linny. “So it was really Dad’s decision to leave?”

  “It was a time—you would not believe it. Everyone was afraid of the future. Your ba, though, he said he would put his hope in this new country. He seemed, what is it, certain when everyone else was not. It was his decision, yes. I was scared to leave my family. I didn’t want to leave them. But your ba and I were married, and I had
Van in my belly. So we went.” She paused and gave Linny a tired smile. “It’s so long ago. No use being sorry about it.”

  “But it sounds like you didn’t want to go.”

  “Of course I’m glad to be here. America is America. Look at you and Van. We’re very lucky to be here—I know that. We could have been killed any time along the way. We could have left too late and sunk in a boat. We were very lucky, yes.” But there was wistfulness, a note of bittersweetness, in her voice. “Your ba was different then. What he expected from America is not what he got.”

  Linny said nothing, let her mother talk on. In the room it could have been late afternoon or sunset; it could have been hours since she’d stepped inside. Linny’s mother talked, and Linny heard her out. And she understood what her mother had been complaining about all these years: her father had always feared failure. Even escaping had come to seem like failure to him.

  It hadn’t been that way at first. All those times he stood in line for meals at Camp Pendleton and played card games through the hours of waiting, Mr. Luong had felt ready to see what would happen beyond the gates and barbed-wire fence. When Van was born in the camp, three months after they arrived, he told his wife he was proud of their daughter for being an automatic U.S. citizen, for anchoring them to this new country.

  But then came, as her mother described it, a slow letdown. Linny could imagine that easily, for it brought to her own memories of childhood a kind of sharpness, like seeing a map in three-dimensions: the cobbling together of a community, the breath of relief just glimpsing another black-haired head in the aisles of the grocery store. It wasn’t easy, her mother said, to ignore the people who crossed their arms at the sight of them and said, I can’t understand you. Speak English! And perhaps Linny too made up part of that long fall into disappointment, in turning out not to be the boy her father had imagined having. Then, before Thuy Luong knew it, she was installed at a sewing machine at Roger’s while her husband installed tile in houses around west Michigan. No wonder he had buried himself into Luong Inventions, as if such burrowing would dig a tunnel toward light, fame, his name aglow. He had been fascinated by the children’s series of biographies on great inventors that Van brought home from the school library. Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, George Washington Carver—these people rose from obscurity and made people listen to what they could do.